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As Webster and Newtown show, violence can mar even the most idyllic place: Michael DeMocker

Lake Road residents are evacuated from the neighborhood Dec. 24 in Webster, New York. A former convict set a house and car ablaze in his lakeside New York state neighborhood to lure firefighters then opened fire on them, killing two and engaging police in a shootout before killing himself while several homes burned. Authorities used an armored vehicle to evacuate the area.
(Photo by AP Photo/Democrat & Chronicle, Max Schulte)

"Aside from the occasional fires, it seemed nothing bad ever happened where I grew up."

When I was 4 years old, my house caught fire. I was napping in my room when my mother woke me. She wrapped me in a blanket and took me outside, where I saw the roof burning right over the room where I had been sleeping.

The volunteer firefighting siren was wailing in the distance. Within minutes, the firefighters arrived and quickly put out the blaze, which had started when a burning newspaper escaped the chimney. I got to wear a fireman's helmet for my bravery, which pretty much amounted to sleeping through most of the event. My town's volunteer fire department was made up of my friends' fathers, my neighbors and even a carpenter who would eventually be the one to repair the damage.

Being 4 and impressionable, I, of course, decided I wanted to become a firefighter. I dressed up as one that Halloween. Whenever the town's firefighting siren started wailing, my brothers and sisters and I would run up to the road in case the fire trucks passed our way. Over the years, my career of choice changed from firefighter to airline pilot to police officer. The irony that I now work for a newspaper, the source of that fire, is not lost on me.

But even as a teenager, I still got a rush of excitement when the volunteer fire siren went off, and I fantasized about what heroic adventures these firefighters were embarking on.

I grew up in a large house with my eight brothers and sisters on the edge of Lake Ontario. The road we lived on twisted through the woods, apple orchards on one side, wooded slopes leading down to the tempestuous Great Lake on the other. There was a park with a sledding hill the local kids called Deadman's Hill, with good reason. When driving that road, we often caught deer in our headlights, getting that stare for which deer in headlights are so famous. In the summers, we would chase fireflies in a field across the way. There was an amusement park called Seabreeze on top of a bluff a few miles west where I took dates, on those rare occasions I could get one.

My greatest achievement as a boy was hitting a baseball so hard it landed in the middle of the street two acres away, causing a car to slam on its brakes. We weren't allowed to ride our bikes on Lake Road, but we did it anyway. According to my parents, the greatest danger of our neighborhood was the blind curves of Lake Road.

When it snowed, and it snowed all the time, there was a sense of all-encompassing silence and peace I have never known since.

Aside from the occasional fires, it seemed nothing bad ever happened where I grew up. But when I was a teenager, a man down the road killed his grandmother with a hammer. We read about it in the newspaper, and every time we drove by the house where it happened, I felt a coldness, like finding a hole in a blanket.

In time I forgot about the fire siren and the murder and Lake Road, and I moved away from Webster, New York, and didn't return, and I didn't become a firefighter.

On Christmas Eve last week, I was in Dallas waiting to fly back after shooting the Saints' win when my older sister sent me a link to a story about a man who had shot four volunteer firefighters on the road where we grew up. Two of them had died. The shooter was the same man who had killed his grandmother on Lake Road 32 years ago. It was the same volunteer fire department that put out the fire at our house.

I have lived in New Orleans for more than 20 years. I have learned to tell fireworks from gunfire and frequently lie to my son about what he is hearing, but I know I will never be able to give him a childhood like I had. I can't drive a mile in any direction from my home without coming across the scene of a murder I have covered. My son's native city is to me a Twister mat of violence, and I often wonder if I should have gone back to Lake Road or something like it. But as the pointless, senseless, stupid massacres of the past few weeks have shown me, no place is safe from violence -- not an elementary school in Connecticut or a quiet road by a lake or, as I learned this week, childhood memories I thought were untouchable.